Today I was surfing around to find potential interviewees for an upcoming episode of my Crafting Voices podcast, when I landed on an artist’s site that actually hurt my eyes. (I’ve blurred out the name of the site to protect the guilty)

Now I suppose that this artist has pretty good work, but I could barely look at it because they had unfortunately designed their site with a bright red background and tiny little pictures…and to make matters worse, the links were in pale lavender. After a minute or two of looking around the site, I just had to leave because of the vast sea of red assaulting my eyes. And my eyes were still watery a few minutes after leaving the site.

Now if I really, really wanted to look at the site, I could have adjusted my monitor…and to be fair the site looked a little less bright on my PC’s monitor…but it was still uncomfortably bright…but how many of your visitors will be willing to adjust their monitors just to look at your site? In most cases they’ll flee to preserve their eyesight just like I did. So when choosing background colors or background images for your web site, remember these tips:

1. Avoid large blocks of very bright colors. Watch your reds, oranges, and particularly vibrant shades of blue or green. If your color palette includes bright colors, make sure that it’s not large expanses of unbroken color, break it up with text and picture to minimize the impact.

2. Avoid large busy patterns for a background. These also hurt the eyes and it’s a nightmare when you add text.

3. Avoid background colors that are too close to the color of the text. Low contrast between the text and the background makes your copy hard to read and strains the eyes. That also goes for active and visited hyperlinks.

4. Try to check the color of your background on different monitors. What looks sunny and perky on your monitor might be blinding on someone else’s

If there are some tips I might have missed, leave a comment and add yours!

Picking a nice, coherent color scheme for your web site can be ticklish task. I know I’m always worried that I’ll pick something too clich?, to boring, or just downright hideous. Fortunately, there are some tools that help you out when you’re stumped for choice.

Adobe Systems, the folks behind Photoshop and Illustrator has this cool online color palette tool called Kuler in which you can create your own color palettes, share them with others, look at the palettes that other people have created, and even download the palette as a theme to use with your Adobe Creative Suite 2 software.

Even if you don’t download the particular theme, you can still dig deeper and get the RGB codes and the Hex numbers for the particular colors. While I don’t think that there is a “Web safe color option” in these themes, it’s still good for seeing what kind of color combinations you and other people can come up with.

As cool as this tool is, there are a couple caveats. One, you’ll need to upgrade to Flash Player 9 since it’s built in Flash 9. I get the sneaking suspicion that they’re doing this so everyone will upgrade to the latest version of Flash Player…but while it’s an inconvenience it’s a minor one. Second, although you can look at the different color combinations, if you want to download a theme, see the RGB codes or create your own theme, you’ll need to get an Adobe ID. Signing up for an Adobe account is free and fairly easy though. So you can try out Kuler here:
http://kuler.adobe.com/

Another tool that doesn’t rely on Flash or an Adobe ID is an old standby that I’ve been using for years. The Color Index by Jim Krause is color reference book that has over 1100 color combinations in both CMYK and RGB modes. There’s a whole section that deals only with web safe color combinations and palettes are divided by mood and intensity. I’ve bought this book years ago and it sits right next to my computer. I still reach for it on occasion to help get me out of a color rut, marking some combinations for possible use and sometimes taking similar palettes and doing my own mixes from the suggested palettes.

Do you have a favorite color combo tool that you use that I haven’t mentioned? Leave a comment and let me know!

One of the many annoyances of web design is having to pick a nice font for your web site that isn’t Arial or Times New Roman or Helvetica. Sure you can take your chances and pick a nice font that you found on your computer, but remember that everyone else in the world may not have it installed on theirs…and as a result, instead of your web page displaying that cool font it will default to another font like…Arial…Times New Roman…or Helvetica.

Fortunately, there’s a neat tool on the web that can help you choose and format your fonts. Typetester, an online font comparison tool allows you to choose and view different types of fonts side by side. It has a list of fonts that are common to all computers as well as list of fonts that are common on Windows machines and on Apple machines. You can also test out all of the neat typography tricks that graphic designers love to tweak, like the adjusting the leading and word spacing and adding font decoration. And by using the side by side comparison feature, you can test different fonts and settings with each other. Very useful…be sure to check it out!

Two problems I’ve always run into when creating designs for web sites are:

1. Coming up with a fresh cool design
2. Working my way out of a design problem

Fortunately there are resources out on the web that can help you if you find yourself out of inspiration and out of creative steam when designing your site. The SEOmoz blog has 8 great tips on how to pull yourself out of a design rut. I must say that tips #4- “Learn to let it go” and #5- “Step away from the computer” does actually work wonders, especially if you’re ready to toss your computer over a balcony.

If you’re gathering design ideas for your web site, look no further than Design Meltdown. This web site/blog is a virtual encyclopedia of wonderfully executed examples of actual web sites. Design styles are divided into categories so if you’re looking for examples of a clean, minimalist design, for a retro style, or even examples of blog sites, ecommerce sites or portfolio sites, inspiration is only a couple clicks away.

Any other ideas about how to get web design inspiration? Leave a comment and tell me about them.